Friday, 26 February 2010

But now I passgraveyards in a car.The dead lie,unsuperstitiously,with their feet toward me --please forgive me forsaying the tombstones would notfancy their faces turned from the highway.

Oh perish the thoughtI was thinking in that momentNewman Illinoisthe Saturday night dance --what a life? Would I like it again?No. Once I returned late summerfrom California thin from journeying and the girls were not the same.You'll say that's naturalthey had been dancing all the time.

In My Youth I Was a Tireless Dancer: Edward Dorn, from Hands Up! (1964)

(The poet's friend Lucia Berlin recalled Ed's account of returning home to Villa Grove from an early trip to Southern California and attempting to make a minor splash at one of those summertime Newman, Illinois Saturday night dances: "He was about sixteen. That was when the pachuco kids out in L.A. were wearing zoot-suit pants. Ed, with his great sense of style, had brought back home the most beautiful pair of pants. He loved to talk about those pants, they were brown-and-white-striped gabardine, they had those big wide pleats, he went on and on describing the weave and the fabric of those pants. They were so fine. Well, he brought them back to Illinois, wore them to the dance -- and nobody had ever seen such a thing!")Phenakistoscope: A Couple Waltzing: Eadweard Muybridge, c. 1893 (Library of Congress)Soldier inspecting men wearing Zoot Suits at Woody Herman concert, Washington, D.C.: photo by John Ferrell, 1942 (Library of Congress)

10 comments:

Thanks for this Tom, and to think that (coincidence) yesterday after that long 'note' to you I ran into Joanne when I was coming out of the water, who mentioned (in passing) Ed Dorn, who shows up here. . . . Meanwhile, south wind kicking up, more rain soon ---

The first time I saw Ed walk into a room at the University of Colorado, I knew he had "style" (and this was before I had really read his work) . . . but isn't that finally what attracts us to the poems we respond to?

Style is mysterious, but it includes elegance and sharpness, a simple "rightness" . . . no extraneous words . . . (which would partly explain the period between Hello La Jolla and Abhorrences ) . . .

I remember especially a Halloween party at Boulder when he and Jenny came as, well, denizens of the 1920s, and the hat he was wearing, and the Jack Daniels that was being passed around, and the uproarious laughter when he said that Wallace Stevens was the Christine Jorgensen of poetry . . . (well, maybe it was only me who laughed) . . .

Thanks Otto, you've put your finger on it. I feel exactly the same way: no matter how many times I read this poem (and I've read it many, many times, over many, many years), when I've finished it I always want to read it again.